Google won’t build featured snippets analytics in Search Console

Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst, said at SMX Advanced this morning during his keynote that Google is not actively working on a tool within Google Search Console for publishers to understand their featured snippets.

About a year ago, we caught Google testing featured snippets within Google Search Analytics. But those tests must be done now, because Gary said they are not actively working on this feature.

Gary did say they have a solution to show publishers this data. “We have something that we think would answer those questions, but we cannot release it,” Gary said.

They cannot release it because the people who make the decisions at Google, Gary’s bosses, he said, won’t allow them to release it. He said “some people don’t want to see this feature this launched for various [reasons].”

What Gary suggested was that you should communicate to Google what you would do with that data so he can bring that sales pitch back to his bosses. They need to find a use case where it would help publishers make better content.

Gary did add that Google is working on a solution to show publishers when their web pages are used by Google by voice search. But they have no such plans for featured snippets.

Gary later added that featured snippets data is not dead, but it is a political reason why they are not launching it yet. We, SEOs and Gary, need to convince Google to launch it.